Turning and turning in the widening gyre | The falcon cannot hear the falconer | Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold | Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world | The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere | The ceremony of innocence is drowned | The best lack all conviction, while the worst | Are full of passionate intensity. — W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

Encircling Empire: Report #26 — Reviewing Force Multipliers

This and previous issues have been archived on a dedicated site—please see: ENCIRCLING EMPIRE. For frequent updates, please “like” our Facebook page and/or follow on Twitter.

Over the period of a month, from October to November of this year, an experiment was attempted: to deliver an extended “lecture” via Zero Anthropology and its Twitter and Facebook connections, using a combination of articles and image-quotes. These were extracted from material presented in the Force Multipliers volume, which itself has been made available for free. The results? Ambiguous, to say the least. It’s not clear at all just how (un)successful this effort at what is in effect free public education–ultimately funded by the Canadian public–has been, can be, or will be.

While many US and UK anthropologists, among others, seem particularly enthused with the idea of “public anthropology,” and being “relevant” in public discussions on “contemporary issues,” and while Canadian universities emphasize “knowledge mobilization” (public communication, open access, “community outreach”), the case for any of these thrusts remains less than convincing. Far less attention is paid to what Pierre Bourdieu warned over two decades ago: the desire for increased public visibility can produce a relationship that undermines and erodes academic autonomy (to the extent that there is any), while promoting the celebrated figure of the journalist-activist (Twitter is a proving ground for this type) as a new claimant to academic capital, but with less and less scientific substance. Justifiably, some warn against us about the phenomenon of academics with a high K-index rating, that is, a large Kardashian factor (more followers in social media with comparatively fewer citations of published research, or just little published work).

On the other hand, as the US State Department and US military and intelligence agencies, along with US-based corporations, are intent on seeding the Web with images, messages, and lures to serve US foreign policy aims, it would seem wise to offer more to analyze, explain, and counter such efforts. Hence the online “lecture,” presenting resources necessary for questioning and reversing the dominant mode of ideological regimentation that serves the imperial state, by taking apart the language of its cherished constructs.

Analysis and explanation: many quasi-theories are popular out there, that treat the production and deployment of US power in far-fetched terms. However, one of the most basic points of the Force Multipliers volume and online “lecture,” was to show that US political leaders, diplomats, corporate executives, and military strategists, have each devised a core set of theories and plans that are designed precisely to infiltrate, manipulate, divide, and destabilize societies around the world. Is that “new”? Not at all–indeed, current plans feed on the long history of the US as the “new empire” (it has been a new empire for nearly two centuries now). What is different is the degree of emphasis–the degree of anxious, almost desperate and thus excessive reliance on leveraging other actors to serve US interests, and to reduce the costs of US dominance. What also stands out is the degree of extraction, that is, force multiplication as another form of capital accumulation.

Counter-operations: As warned in the following slide presentation, another key point that is the basic message of the force multipliers idea is that within the pseudo-science of “force multipliers,” there is a dangerous statement of intent: to use humans as a form of drone, being less expensive yet more precise and in less need of constant guidance, than their mechanical counterparts. Right now, many are rightly exercised about the brutal impact of mechanical drones, while being less attentive to their far more destructive flesh-and-bone counterparts. The threat to sovereignty today is an insidious one. Though the confrontation with local collaborators of empire is not by any means “new,” the current phase of struggles against US domination will require more intensified efforts, beginning at home, given that an overreaching empire relies ever more on local proxies.

To begin this round-up, here is a list of all articles on force multipliers published on Zero Anthropology:

Just a note of appreciation for the effort at public education as well as the degree of thought and skill that go into your research and writing. I always look forward to ZA posts and happy to see it was not becoming another dormant project.

That said, I am curious as to what your expectations and/or desires may have been?

A view from the ‘street’ may offer some sobering context to your obvious dismay at the lack of response. I am just a man in the street but one who has been a student of this physical terrain for a some time and also a bit of witness over the last thirty years to the the subtle but tectonic shifts in psychological terrain that governs much of social life. Something that clearly effects the capacity for people to think, organize, and resist imperial domination.

There is no social consequence to remaining ignorant in contemporary culture – that is rewarded. There are significant consequences for pursuing this kind of knowledge and wishing to act on it: alienation from family and peers for whom such knowledge disrupts their personal illusions and bubbles of well being, threatening one’s economic survival, inviting surveillance from the state that monitors traffic to websites like yours and most certainly tracks one’s web activity in relation to other personal data to determine/anticipate actions/intentions/threats, the routine entrapment of activists and the infiltration or cooptation of organizations, the outright fabrication of organizations to manage dissent, publications, journalist and writers for whom we have no idea ‘who’ they really are, then their is the isolation and depression that comes with the bifurcation of reality – one of which is remarkable painful to live in and the other, remarkably lonely. I could go on. Clearly the effect of the panopticon, whether real or largely a fiction, is having its effect on the the class I think you are directing your efforts.

The internet has only intensified the level of individuation, self-absorption, framing and allows remarkable levels of internal and external control over one’s perceptions, emotions, understandings, etc. The plethora of cognitive biases that plague us are now software algorithms that manage us. Divide and conquer is both an internal as well as external strategy of Empire. Understanding the external machinations will do little to unravelling the internal ones for which social action is thoroughly contigent on.

It appears that the more one is embedded in the cloth of maistream society, the less likely they will want to see or understand the nature of material conditions of their existence, particularly if they are comfortable and well positioned in the global hierarchy. The bourgoise mind, that is to say the middle class mind, as I expereince it on a day to day basis, is a hermetically sealed unit of social production and I would say only something traumatic would crack that seal.

The depth of the topography of power that you delineate is both overwhelming and terrifying. Written largely for those that read seriously (and have the time to read), it excludes a vast swath of the public….who probably already know that they are, for the most part, are slaves.
This is not a criticism of your work in anyway, just some thoughts as to why it is so quiet out here.